This book was a trial. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Bowen’s writing and so kept waiting for this book to pull up. To be fair, it did a little at the end, but it didn’t save it for me.
Plot: Griff was a promising college athlete who, just as he was about to make the leap into professional sports, had to quit to go back to take care of the family farm. There he made a life for himself, which he was satisfied with. Until the rich party girl he slept with once in college, newly impoverished and with a passion for food, lands on his doorstep with a devil’s bargain – going into business with an infamous corporation that owns a bunch of restaurants.
Most of romance does hit certain beats, and once you’ve read a lot of it you can usually spot the rhythm of those beats. You will likely not only spot the rhythm of this story, you probably know the words. City girl with a tough job and an abusive boss is forced to go to a small town where she falls in love with a strapping farmer. It’s fine. There is a weird sub plot with Audrey’s harridan feminist workaholic mother teaching Audrey that it’s not enough to want to be a home cook on a farm to a bunch of strapping young men. It resolves less problematically than I expected, for what it’s worth, but this book is still very heteronormative. I didn’t dislike it, I just also didn’t really enjoy it either.